In the spirit of Com­edy Central’s recent ‘Roast of William Shat­ner’ trib­ute, here’s a lov­ing piece about Capt­ian James Tiberius Kirk’s momen­tus sci-fi manhood.

Cap­tain Kirk’s bulging trousers

A tour­ing exhi­bi­tion of gen­uine Star Trek gim­cracks reminds Mark Simp­son of the vir­ile great­ness of the orig­i­nal Shatner/Nimoy series — and the p.c. limp­ness of all the spinoffs.

(Orig­i­nally appeared on Salon.com Feb. 26, 2003)

The first thing that greets me is Capt. Kirk’s pack­age. Jim’s inter­galac­tic man­hood is clearly, alarm­ingly out­lined against the fab­ric of his tight 1960s-cut black trousers, dress­ing very much to the left. I assure you I wasn’t look­ing for it — it just loomed up like a de-cloaked Romu­lan Bird of Prey. It shouldn’t be sur­pris­ing that James Tiberius Kirk, the famously gung-ho Starfleet com­man­der, went com­mando, boldly swing­ing where no man had swung before. Maybe that, as much as his twinkly mascara’d eyes and his cap­taincy of the fastest, flashiest vehi­cle in the galaxy, the USS Enter­prise, was the secret of cad­dish Jim’s phe­nom­e­nal suc­cess with lady humanoids and aliens alike.

Indu­bitably, as his first offi­cer might have said, rais­ing one angled eye­brow, this was the cru­cial dif­fer­ence between the sweaty, highly Freudian orig­i­nal “Star Trek” series and the sex­less, sweat­less, p.c. “Star Trek: The Next Gen­er­a­tion.” Can you imag­ine Jean-Luc Picard not wear­ing spot­less knick­ers with a built-in con­tain­ment field, changed twice a day and incin­er­ated after use?

Alas, I’m not actu­ally in the hum­bling pres­ence of the god­like genius of William Shat­ner him­self. Rather, I’m gaz­ing up at a mon­i­tor play­ing a clip from “The Trou­ble With Trib­bles” in a med­ley of “clas­sic ‘Star Trek’ moments,” at an exhi­bi­tion ded­i­cated to a genre and a uni­verse that have, so to speak, sprung from his loins. “Star Trek: The Adven­ture,” held in a “climate-controlled” “hi-tech” 7,000-square-foot tent in London’s Hyde Park, show­cases the “Trek” uni­verse, from the orig­i­nal series more than 35 years ago to the newest fea­ture film, “Star Trek: Neme­sis.” Sets, cos­tumes, props and mod­els from “Star Trek,” “The Next Gen­er­a­tion,” “Deep Space Nine,” “Voy­ager” and the cur­rent “Trek” series, the low-tech “Enter­prise” pre­quel, are all here. Billed as the biggest “Star Trek” exhi­bi­tion ever, the Lon­don show has been a great suc­cess. This is only the first stop on a world tour, tak­ing in Europe, Aus­tralia and the U.S., on a “five-year mis­sion to boldly go where ‘Star Trek’ has never been before” — although where that would be is some­thing of a mystery.

In addi­tion to six suc­cess­ful “Trek” TV series, each of them being rerun some­where in the world right now, there have been 10 “Trek” movies, gross­ing well over $1 bil­lion. Ama­zon lists 1,238 “Trek” books, 1,832 “Trek” auc­tions, 515 videos, 73 music items, 61 PC and video games. I sim­ply refuse to enter “Star Trek” into a Web search engine, as I fear it will cause some kind of ter­ri­ble e-feedback loop and global net over­heat­ing of the kind that hap­pened when­ever Kirk asked some upstart out-of-control alien com­puter to com­pute “love.”

The whole phe­nom­e­non is, to use another Spock­ism, fas­ci­nat­ing. The “Trek” series is not only the most fright­en­ingly suc­cess­ful and prof­itable TV series of our “time­line” but also one that has helped to make tele­vi­sion what it is — and us what we are. “Star Trek” really did turn out to be the future — not of faster-than-light space travel, but of couch-potato enter­tain­ment. We have been, to use yet another Trekkian phrase, assim­i­lated. Resis­tance was futile.

If the orig­i­nal “Star Trek” series was an exer­cise in the power of human imag­i­na­tion — and frus­trated aspi­ra­tion — the mas­sive “Trek” exhi­bi­tion can only be called an exer­cise in hubris. Per­haps that is why the mon­i­tor on which I glimpsed Kirk’s pack­age is sway­ing a lit­tle, as is every­thing else sus­pended from the ceil­ing — the vast “hi-tech” tent is mov­ing in the wind, mak­ing slightly dis­tract­ing and very non­fu­tur­is­tic clank­ing noises. Close up, impris­oned behind glass cases, the props and cos­tumes look rather dis­ap­point­ing and for­lorn, like deeply dis­counted items in a the­atri­cal sup­ply store. The dis­rupters and phasers are bits of badly painted wood; the scale mod­els of the var­i­ous Enter­prises are the dis­carded toys of rich kids. The recre­ated bar from “Deep Space Nine” looks like the sort of place you wouldn’t hang out in unless you wanted to pick up a low-rent trans­ves­tite (mind you, if that had been true of the infan­tile series itself it might have been worth watching).

The armory from the “Enter­prise” series, com­plete with pho­ton tor­pedo launch­ers, is more impres­sive but some­thing of an elab­o­rate tease. Like the other control-panel-based exhibits here, much of the instru­men­ta­tion is cov­ered with glass screens and large signs warn­ing “DO NOT TOUCH.” What other rea­son would you have to come to a “Star Trek” exhi­bi­tion except to press, in Stimpy-esque tongue-lolling aban­don, all those but­tons you’ve seen wink­ing at you on TV over the years?

The Scim­i­tar brig restraint cage from the “Neme­sis” film, in which Picard is all too briefly impris­oned, is here, but has, like the film itself, the rather tired, S/M-catalog feel that dom­i­nated the later, Borg-rich episodes of “Next Gen­er­a­tion” — the near­est that series ever got to sex. The Borg were, after all, everyone’s night­mare fetish-party peo­ple — sado­masochists who tried to acces­sorize them­selves a per­son­al­ity and con­sid­ered them­selves irresistible.

My pulse begins to quicken near the exit, how­ever, when I spot, like a bea­con, Capt. Kirk’s cocky char­treuse green velour shirt with gold braided cuffs and also his … black trousers. They are, in a dis­play of cos­tumes from the orig­i­nal series, wrapped around a head­less dummy instead of around Kirk’s corseted, bewigged torso. No doubt I’m a ter­mi­nal nos­tal­gic — as a boy I watched “Star Trek” on ‘70s TV in a state of arousal bor­der­ing on psy­chosis which, obvi­ously, has yet to sub­side — but the orig­i­nal “Trek” uni­forms, like the series itself, seem much more excit­ing than any­thing that fol­lowed. These are not clothes so much as arche­types. Like “Trek” tech­nol­ogy, they embody an idea of func­tion rather than a prac­ti­cal elab­o­ra­tion of it. Here is the cool, intel­lec­tual blue of Spock’s tunic, with his trusty tri­corder hand­bag slung over the shoul­der; here the feisty red of Lt. Uhura’s cos­tume, breasts surg­ing for­ward like rock­ets, with stream­lined waist, miniskirt tail­fins spout­ing a plume of long, long tights, and knee-length pointy black boots.

Ahem. Any­way, “Star Trek” was very … pointy. In addi­tion to the boots, and Kirk’s pack­age, there were pointy side­burns, pointy breasts, pointy ears, pointy Fed­er­a­tion logos, pointy let­ter­ing in the cred­its, and also the point­edly pointy mis­sion state­ment: “To boldly go where no man has gone before,” which of course was bluntly de-sexed by “Next Gen­er­a­tion” to “…where no one has been before.” Per­haps this is why the “Next Gen­er­a­tion” crew were dressed like flight atten­dants on a par­tic­u­larly dull 1980s air­line — one that went bust because the syn­thetic fibers and padding pro­duced so much sta­tic elec­tric­ity that insur­ers refused to cover them. “Voy­ager” became much pointier, and more watch­able, when in later years declin­ing rat­ings beamed aboard the stream­lined and coolly log­i­cal Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan), promptly mas­sag­ing up the Nielsen points. (Per­haps that is why “Enter­prise” fea­tures the sim­i­larly space­wor­thy female Vul­can first offi­cer T’Pol, her uni­form snugly inhab­ited by Jolene Blalock.)

“Star Trek” uni­forms remain time­less clas­sics, ones that seem to have directly inspired ‘70s glam rock — Ziggy Star­dust, for instance, looked as though he would have fit in on the Enter­prise. Cer­tainly Kirk would have shagged him.

It seems ironic, given the kind of peo­ple who are Trekkies — bed-wetting ide­al­ists for the most part — that the post-‘60s incar­na­tion of the series has become per­haps the sym­bol of cor­po­rate cul­ture, glob­al­iza­tion and “Amer­i­can impe­ri­al­ism” — though gen­er­ally dressed in the drabbest kind of polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness. The spin­offs have pro­duced an empire of nerdi­ness. Give me a stripped-to-the-waist Repub­li­can Kirk in full-body makeup, try­ing to remem­ber to suck in his waist while bat­tling a rub­ber lizard-head alien with half-learned karate and pro-wrestling moves, any day of the week.

And then I spy it, like a mirage: the bridge of the orig­i­nal USS Enter­prise. It’s roped off so I can’t ride the turbo lift, fire Sulu’s phasers, mess with Spock’s sci­ence sta­tion, or put my butt where Kirk’s has gone before and take “the con.” I sus­pect that in this instance I wouldn’t even if I could. You can get too close to some­thing that has been so impor­tant to you for so long. In fact, there is some­thing so ven­er­a­ble about this silly wooden set that I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. This is, after all, the holi­est shrine of TV cul­ture, of much more impor­tance to the con­tem­po­rary world than, say, the Church of the Nativ­ity, Shakespeare’s Globe or even Lucille Ball’s liv­ing room.

They really knew about the future in the ‘60s. They really cared about it. It was, of course, a time when peo­ple still believed in it, a time when “Don’t stop think­ing about tomor­row” was not nec­es­sar­ily a self-consciously retro slo­gan. Per­haps that is why the orig­i­nal series, with its female crew mem­bers (albeit in sub­mis­sive jobs) and racial har­mony (ditto — except for Spock, the Jew­ish Vul­can), was rather more adven­tur­ous and pro­gres­sive for its time than its spayed spinoffs.

More impor­tant, in the ‘60s they also knew how to make but­tons and dials that, 35 years on, are much more “futur­is­tic” than any­thing seen since. Not only that, they made them for next to noth­ing. (“Star Trek” cost about $100,000 an episode; Enter­prise costs $6 mil­lion.) From where I’m stand­ing, those but­tons and dials look like the most pre­cious and promis­ing jew­els in the uni­verse. By com­par­i­son, the “Next Gen­er­a­tion” bridge dis­played next door looks like the foyer of an expense-account motel.

Nat­u­rally, true Trekkies pre­fer the more recent series, pre­cisely because they have much big­ger bud­gets, more spe­cial effects — and no William Shat­ner. Appar­ently Star Trek cre­ator Gene Rod­den­berry (and much of the orig­i­nal cast) despised Shat­ner and the way he played Kirk. He was too aggres­sive, too vio­lent, too sex­ist, too vain. The anal-retentive goody-goody Jean-Luc Picard, played fas­tid­i­ously by Patrick Stew­art, was much closer to what Rod­den­berry had in mind.

It was Shatner’s Kirk, with all his mag­nif­i­cent flaws and van­i­ties, how­ever, who made “Star Trek” more than just another can­celed ‘60s sci-fi series. He saved the show from its own appalling vir­tu­ous­ness — or, to put it more pre­ten­tiously, he was the Dionysian bass line to Roddenberry’s Apol­lon­ian synth music. (By the same token, Cmdr. Data’s quest to become human on “Next Gen­er­a­tion” is comic, since his col­leagues seem to aspire to be androids.) Shat­ner was rock ‘n’ roll — his post-Trek album-cum-aural break­down, “The Trans­formed Man,” notwith­stand­ing. It was his per­ver­sity, his Napoleonic ego, that made “Star Trek” an epic for our times. Not for noth­ing was his pre-“Trek” project a can­celed series called “Alexan­der the Great,” star­ring Shat­ner as the lov­able Mace­don­ian psy­chopath him­self. Shat­ner has earned his place in the pan­theon of post­war vir­ile degen­er­acy: What Brando did for the cin­ema and Elvis did for music, Shat­ner did for the small screen.

In fact — and I think I can say this with no fear of insult­ing Jim Car­rey, him­self a help­less Shat­ner fanatic — Bill is sim­ply the great­est actor that Canada has ever pro­duced. Although he was (and is) an out­ra­geous ham, apply­ing the “skills” he devel­oped per­form­ing in Canada’s Shake­spearean the­ater (“I com­bine Eng­lish tech­nique with Amer­i­can viril­ity”) as indis­crim­i­nately to “Star Trek” scripts as LBJ did Agent Orange to the jun­gles of South­east Asia, baf­flingly stress­ing words and syl­la­bles that mere mor­tals might think had no impor­tance, paus­ing painfully in the mid­dle of sen­tences while rush­ing head­long over their con­clu­sions, there is some­thing oddly pow­er­ful about many of his per­for­mances. Even some­thing believ­able and human, espe­cially in the slightly camp con­text of a series like “Star Trek.” Even Shatner’s van­ity is sym­pa­thetic. The taste­ful, restrained, man­nered — and, let’s face it, bour­geois — seri­ous­ness of Picard and “Voyager’s” Capt. Janeway (Kate Mul­grew) seems faintly ridicu­lous by comparison.

Jim Kirk, as I say, was clearly a Repub­li­can, while the Fed­er­a­tion itself was clearly Demo­c­ra­tic. The arrange­ment appeared to reflect that of a Repub­li­can White House and a Demo­c­ra­tic Con­gress, the favored mech­a­nism of Cold War con­sen­sus. For­tu­nately for the story lines, this meant that Kirk was con­stantly break­ing the Federation’s Prime Direc­tive, which for­bade inter­fer­ence in alien cul­tures. Cur­rently, we see Adm. George W. Bush, with his appar­ent dis­dain for the Prime Direc­tive and also the Fed­er­a­tion (United Nations) itself, in orbit around planet Iraq, prepar­ing to beam down a heav­ily armed away team. Bush prob­a­bly thinks him­self more Kirk than Picard, but he’s mis­taken: He sim­ply doesn’t have the same pathos. Or the twinkly eyes.

Spock, half alien and half human, was another exam­ple of the inher­ent drama of “Star Trek.” He was sup­posed to be coldly log­i­cal but was clearly a bor­der­line hys­teric, as evi­denced by those occa­sions when he was called on to show emo­tion, such as the proto-environmentalist episode “Devil in the Dark,” when he mind-melds with the Horta, a silicone-based life form whose eggs are being destroyed by Fed­er­a­tion min­ers. ‘Pain! PAIN!’ he shrieks, his usu­ally impas­sive face dis­tort­ing hor­rif­i­cally. “Oh, PA-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-IN!”

More­over, Spock was obvi­ously pas­sion­ately in love with his rug-wearing bisex­ual WASP jock cap­tain, some­thing not lost on the bitchy, swishy and rather jeal­ous ship’s doc­tor, Bones McCoy, who wasted no oppor­tu­nity to tease his green-blooded col­league. (For some rea­son all the male “Trek” med­ical staffers have been queeny, even the holo­grams). Inter­est­ingly, the stel­lar love affair between Spock and Kirk, which has its roots in Greek mythol­ogy and Amer­i­can lit­er­a­ture (e.g., Alexan­der and Hep­haes­tion, Huck and Jim, Ish­mael and Quee­queg) seems to have grown out of the clash of Shatner’s and Nimoy’s planet-size thes­pian egos: Rod­den­berry, dri­ven fran­tic by their on-set com­pet­i­tive­ness, was advised by Isaac Asi­mov, no less, to chan­nel it by strength­en­ing their on-screen rela­tion­ship. In addi­tion, a “favored nation” clause was intro­duced into their con­tracts, stip­u­lat­ing that any ben­e­fits accorded to one must apply to the other. In other words, gay cam­paign­ers still call­ing for gay char­ac­ters in the next “Trek” series are miss­ing the point. “Star Trek” fea­tured the world’s first on-screen same-sex mar­riage back in the ‘60s. (Lit­tle won­der then that a whole genre of female-authored “slash” fan fic­tions built around the Spock/Kirk love affair has flour­ished, mak­ing explicit what was always implicit.)

There was a kind of inno­cent inten­sity to many of those shows that is impos­si­ble to repli­cate today, an inten­sity that some­how man­ages to coex­ist with a campy tone, even down to the mar­velous episode titles: “For the World Is Hol­low and I Have Touched the Sky,” “City on the Edge of For­ever,” or “Is There No Truth in Beauty?” — the one where the Enter­prise gives a lift to the Medu­san ambas­sador and his earth­ling assis­tant, a female in a glit­tery dress played by Diana Mul­daur). Appar­ently the Medu­sans have mirac­u­lous nav­i­ga­tional abil­i­ties in which the Fed­er­a­tion is inter­ested. Like a gimp magi­cian, the Medu­san is kept in a shiny box — Medu­sans are so ugly that no human may gaze upon one with­out going mad (in this respect, appar­ently, they resem­ble David Cop­per­field). It tran­spires that his glam­orous female assis­tant is actu­ally blind and “sees” through “a sen­sor array hid­den in her dress.” The Enter­prise gets lost and Spock has to mind-meld (wear­ing natty pink gog­gles) with the Medu­san so that the ambas­sador can use his body to nav­i­gate the ship back to famil­iar space.

All goes well. Unfor­tu­nately, how­ever, while restor­ing the Medu­san to his box, Spock for­gets to put his pink gog­gles back on and goes mad (cue truly fright­en­ing hys­ter­i­cal over­act­ing by Nimoy, in wide-angle extreme close-up). Diana has to mind-meld with Spock to draw him back to san­ity. Then, hav­ing been made insanely jeal­ous by Spock’s meld­ing with the Medu­san, she mind-melds with her boss permanently.

If I had used more cocaine I could have founded an entirely new school of psy­cho­analy­sis on that one episode. “Oedi­pus Rex,” eat your eyes out. That was the great­ness of “Star Trek” — at its best it was like an updated Greek drama for the TV gen­er­a­tion. At its worst, well, it was still enter­tain­ing. Take “Spock’s Brain,” in which the sci­ence officer’s gray mat­ter is stolen by some inter­galac­tic sex kit­tens and a tri­umphant Bones uses an implant and a TV remote con­trol to pilot a zom­bie Spock around.

The true mea­sure of the orig­i­nal series’ bril­liance is that it’s so immense and time­less that it almost makes up for the “Trek”-dreck spin­off series that have fol­lowed. Mer­ci­fully how­ever, it seems that the Trek uni­verse, which has been rapidly cool­ing since 1969, may finally be implod­ing. The new series, “Enter­prise,” des­per­ately escapes the p.c. present-future by return­ing to a low-tech, pre-Kirk past-future (with, appro­pri­ately enough, Scott “Quan­tum Leap” Bakula at the com) in which men are men and are still per­mit­ted to cap­tain space­ships by the seat of their pants. It’s some­thing of a “Home Improve­ment” in space, though rather less pop­u­lar. Dimin­ish­ing rat­ings for the first sea­son of the new series, and protests by devout Trekkies at the cyn­i­cal rewrit­ing of “Trek” his­tory to include oppor­tunis­tic ene­mies such as the Suliban may finally mean the end of that five-year mis­sion that has lasted 35 years.

In this instance, I doubt that even cut­ting the jib of Bakula’s baggy trousers and per­suad­ing him to go com­mando will work. Let’s hope they don’t try.

Copy­right Mark Simp­son 2007